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Tuesday, 11 February 2014

Letters

5: 2006 - Time

Tuesday found me at a thanksgiving assembly, in a school in
Newton – a city on the Eastern edge of Boston.
Like other New England Schools, with the exception of the soccer fields,
this is an enclosed school – heated, protected, light and airy – well built and
appointed. Built to withstand the coming
blizzards and the occasional misdirected hurricane.

Thanksgiving is an old New England celebration. It was only embraced in New York about
seventy years ago and, more recently, in the rest of the country. Avowedly non-commercial (no gifts are given
on Thanksgiving), instead, it is a time for reflection about personal
fortune. Perhaps even more so if one is
a turkey.

For men and turkeys alike, Thanksgiving is made for sermons,
and after the last elections, some blame laying.

The Spencer New Leader carries the writings
of one William Gillmeister, an agricultural economist and devoted family man. Gillmeister makes me chuckle – but that is
probably the last thing on his agenda.
This week, he reminds his readers that they should all give thanks for
the god-given blessing of the right to vote.
Berating the failure of the conservative republicans at the recent
elections, he recounts the story of Belshazzar of Assyria who, according to
Gillmeister, lost his life and kingdom, because he failed to govern
properly. Gillmeister went on to exhort
the Republicans to return to their true philosophical base and re-embrace the
principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. By life, he means the pro-life pro-marriage
platform which he contrasts with
homosexual lifestyle “that leads to death from disease and despair”. Liberty he explains as liberty from
legislative lawlessness and the tyranny of judges who have erroneously defined
marriage. The pursuit of happiness, of
course, allows people to pursue economic prosperity – something that would
return by dropping the minimum wage, removing building controls and rolling
back income tax to 5%.

On the school stage, a different simple sermon is being
spoken. Thanksgiving is a time to
reflect on ones blessings and, without regret, to feast with family.

Nearby, decorating the elegant New England homes, corn husks
are tied to pillars, or dressed in effigy and staked in front yards. Some date the use of corn husks to the feast
day of Saint Stephen, in Scandinavia and England associated with the Yuletide
celebrations. But Saint Stephen was simply
a cipher for the pagan god Freyr, a local concession to common practice church
law was unable to suppress or replace.
In the 13th Century, Sturluson wrote: “Freyr (Ing) is the
most renowned of the Æsi, he rules over the rain and the shining of the sun,
and therewithal the fruit of the earth; and it is good to call on him for fruitful
seasons and peace. He governs also the prosperity of men.” While not worshipped since the 11th
century, we still name girls Ingrid in his favor, New England homes celebrate
the bountiful harvest with corn husks and we all eat a Christmas ham at Christmas. Poor Freyr (“no maid he makes to weep”) is
destined to die at Ragnorok. He will be
killed by the same sword of the gods of the slain, which he bargained away in
order to marry his beloved.

Serving the school and the New England homes at Newton, near
the green hockey field, is a busy shopping centre, bisected by a train
line. People tramp over the train tracks
as though they were walking over any other road. Beneath the superficial and depressing
sameness of the fast food donut franchises, emerges a different picture – in
the alleys are a confusion of different restaurants. Some, the Indian and Thai, are recognizable
to an Australian eye. But others date
from a different time. Here there is the
Café Saint Petersburg and a variety of other Russian and Armenian
restaurants. Reminds me of a sign on an
old building in Salem – an old building on the wharf run by the Council to
assist Russian émigrés. In the local
bread shop, you can buy a Borodinsky – a heavy black bread – coriander malt
dark rye, from a shop assistance who speaks with a strong Russian accent. Here is the legacy of the great Diaspora from
the Russian Ukraine and the Ottoman Middle East 150 years ago.

At the school assembly, the stage is crowded with children
of every race. Beating out a couple of
songs with an African theme.

But even as thanksgiving is being prepared, the decorations
for holiday season are being prepared – with Christmas and Hanukah in the
offing. The occasional car can be
spotted with a tree on top, and in the background the present corn husks
celebrating the harvest – and almost gone now, the last of the decorations from
Halloween and the elections.

I am beginning to think that this place simply moves from
one celebration to another. Certainly
the cultures from which such celebrations might derive are legion. The old catholic church calendar was replete
with feast days to remember the heroes of the church. But the church’s attempt to replace the older
pagan celebrations based on the passage of the seasons did not survive the fall
of Constantinople and the industrial revolution. We continue to use basic divisions of time
that date from before the Christian era – some so old we cannot identify their
origins with certainty.

The division of our week into seven days reflects the number
of heavenly bodies that traveled in an ecliptic path and which were visible to
the ancients. In the names of our days
we still use the names of the old pagan gods – Monandaeg (moon’s day), Tyr’s
day, Wodan’s day, Thor’s day, Frigg’s day, Saturn’s day, Dies Solics (sun’s
day). Tyr was the ancient Germanic god
of war, older even than Wodan, and he is destined to die after killing the
guardian of hell at Ragnorok. Wodan is
the allfather, husband of Frigg, father of Thor – but again at Ragnorok “then
shall Frigg’s sweet friend fall”.

The persistence of these names and celebrations, long after
state or religious sanction was given to them, and sometimes in the teeth of
strong state or religious opposition, deserves reflection. Is this just another limit of the power of
law? Would any attempt to change the
names of the days or the months really work?
All children know of the futility of trying to legislate to stop the
tide from coming in – and slowing the passage of the earth’s progress around
the sun to a more convenient metric seems presently outside our
capability.

Changes in the calendar for similar aesthetic or religious
purposes have been unsuccessful since the Romans renamed Quintilis as Iulius
(July) in 44 BC to honor Julius Caesar and Sextilis as Augustus (August) in 8
BC to honour Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus). More recent attempts have failed – the most
recent attempt, during the French revolution (a brave attempt to give each day
its own special name) is now long forgotton.
The French attempt follows in the footsteps of the failure of Emperor
Commodus’s attempt to rename all twelve months after his own adopted names (Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius, Lucius,
Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus, and Exsuperatorius). Nero’s attempt to change Aprilis to Neroneus
similarly failed to catch the common imagination. To be fair, Charlemagne’s renamed months
lasted in Germany until the 15th Century, possibly because of the
immense utility to the germans of knowing when to do things (Brachmnoth (June)
– plowing month, Wonnemanoth (May) – love making month).

Despite these setbacks, we have a record of successful
reforms to improve the accuracy of each of the calendars in common use – the
Western (Julian/Gregorian), Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic.

The Julian reform introduced in 46BC by Julius Caesar on the
advice of Sosigenes of Alexandria formalized a solar calendar with months at
fixed lengths where one year had 365 days, 12 months and every 4th year was a
leap year with 366 days.In practice, this reform established our recognisable calendar, with a
leap year, aligned with the tropical year (at no mean cost, the Romans had to
endure a 46BC with 445 days). Late in
his life, Augustus fiddled with the number of days in August (to make it equal
in length to Julius’s July), establishing the legal pattern of days we still
use for each month to this day.

However, the Julian reform gradually moved out of synch with
the earth’s rotation. Every 134 years it
gained an extra day by reference to the tropical year. This inconvenient result was remedied on the
basis of legal policy advice (deriving from the first official council of the
Christian Churches in 325 AD, at Nicaea) which held it desirable that the
vernal equinox occurs on 21 March each year.
In 1582, Pope Gregorius XIII declared that the day after 4 October 1582
should be 15 October 1582. Furthermore
the rule for leap years (which said that years divisible with 4 should be leap
years) was changed so that years, at the end of the century, should be leap
years only if they were divisible with 400 (e.g. 1600, 2000, 2400 etc.). The Gregorian reform was belated picked up
throughout the Western world (with the exception of the Orthodox Russian
church).

A number of years ago, the Commonwealth of Australia
accidentally repealed the old Calendar Act – the legislative device by which
the Gregorian calendar was adopted into the British Empire. At that time, law makers were blissfully
unaware of the consequences of this error – and that the Australian Capital
Territory had reverted for about 20 years - from 1984 until 2005 - back to the
Julian system (by that stage about 13 days into the future of the Gregorian
calendar). When the error was discovered
in 2005, it was remedied without remark and without the need for further
metrification or nomenclature change.

The kids leave the auditorium at the school, and kiss their
farewells. For the next four and a half
days they will enjoy a feast-holiday with family or friends. Amidst bare trees, in spite of all the
attempts to tame time, the cold has returned to this land, as it did before the
pagan gods gave time its form. Perhaps
Ragnorok is still just a heart beat away.
Ice specks swirl in the air and, in the perma-shade, water drips freeze
into solid stalagmites near the school.
Like the columns of the old temples, the ice freezes solid as the
tolerance in the eyes of the children, the likewise strength and weakness of
democracies.